


Not for the Feast but for Themselves (The Rootstock Improv)

by azephirin



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abandonment, Ambiguous Relationships, Apples, F/M, Future Fic, Gardens & Gardening, Lack of Communication, Natasha Needs a Hug, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Remix, Spies & Secret Agents, Tea, Thunderstorms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-11 11:36:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4434035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>No fool, she knew that beauty strikes just once, hard, never in comfort.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not for the Feast but for Themselves (The Rootstock Improv)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kvikindi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/gifts).
  * Inspired by [As in Animal Life](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3642993) by [kvikindi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi). 



> Thanks to thedeadparrot and poisontaster for beta. Title and summary from [Apples](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/apples), by Grace Schulman.

The postcard reads, _I’m ok. It’s warm here, and there’s work to do. Tell Tony I’ll send him a postcard too, in case this one gets there first._ The handwriting is angular, its letters a string of capitals. Natasha doesn’t know it well, but there’s no question whose it is.

She shreds Bruce’s postcard along with Natalie Rushman’s old bank statements.

As promised, there are more the next day—not one but two, and letters, not postcards, one for Tony and one for Natasha. She knows of the additional letter only because Tony tells her—she could have intercepted its delivery, but it would be a lot of effort for something likely to net little information.

Natasha is not sure what she’s expecting her letter to read, but the actual contents are a surprise. _Would you please take care of the plants? It’s involved but not terribly difficult. If you don’t want to do it, though, just tell Tony, and he can hire someone._

What follow are a number of pages of instructions for the care of orchids, lilies, succulents, and fruit trees. Nothing else. No information about Bruce’s actual life or where he really is or whether he might be planning on returning. Just horticulture. The apple trees apparently need to be pruned annually, and not for a good number of months, at which point, by implication, Bruce does not foresee himself being present.

What Natasha really wants to do is throw the damn plants off his terrace, every single one of them, pot by pot, but she reconsiders: people at street level would almost certainly be injured, and it’s not the fault of the plants that their previous caretaker is an idiot who abandoned them for reasons of dubious merit.

 

* * *

 

The succulents, mostly cacti but also an aloe plant, a jade plant, a wild yam, and a bizarre-looking thing that Google calls a baseball plant, are pretty low-maintenance. Natasha finds that she rather enjoys them: their tough, leathery exteriors; their prickles; the way they stand stoic and flourish with deep, infrequent watering. Watering and mulching the apple trees is a pain in the ass, but the fruit is undeniably delicious, so she persists.

The orchids and lilies, though, are like tiny, cantankerous infants, or maybe old people. They require constant and fastidious care, and nothing about the effort expended seems worth the minimal return. Why, of all the things Bruce could have asked a spy with an unpredictably schedule to care for, did he choose orchids? There is no good answer—and no return address to which Natasha may direct an invective-filled query.

The solution turns out to be unexpectedly simple. Throwing them away seems like an incredibly waste, and when Natasha asks Pepper about a good place to donate them, she learns that the Maria Stark Foundation funds an elementary school with a gardening program. The focus has been food, but Pepper opines that some of the children might enjoy the flowers—and the Foundation could certainly fund a greenhouse. And so the orchids and lilies are carefully loaded into a van bound for the Bronx, and they are officially no longer Natasha’s problem.

 

* * *

 

Finding and securing the facility upstate takes some time, but she and Steve manage it, and the Avengers officially move to a deceptively sleepy, wooded part of the Hudson Valley. Natasha has never owned much except for her clothes, but now she finds herself arranging transport for what is now her collection of trees and succulents. Enough time has passed since Bruce abandoned them that, Natasha thinks, they can no longer be claimed as his.

The compound sits on plenty of land; the trees can easily be situated outdoors, in natural soil. The succulents have to be divided up, though, because Natasha’s quarters aren’t large enough for all of them. Steve and Sam take a number of them, and Wanda too, and even Rhodey, after some inveigling from the others. Vision needs no convincing, but, after a lengthy survey of the entire selection, chooses only one specimen: a small, low, extensively spiny plant known as a thimble cactus. He cradles it in his large, graceful hands, and Natasha thinks that he probably would have been a good candidate for the flowers, if she hadn’t given them all away. She doesn’t regret it, though: she hears from Pepper that the kids are enjoying them, and there are even pictures now and then of smiling students with their chosen orchids and lilies.

The trees come up in a climate-controlled semi, and replanting them takes most of a day. First there are the holes to be dug: it’s very convenient to have a supersoldier, a telekinetic, and a being made of vibranium, along with two standard-issue burly guys and a grounds crew, to help with that. Next, Wanda is able to disintegrate the clay pots without shattering them and possibly damaging the roots; as she does, the others hold the tree carefully by the lower trunk and settle it into its new home.

Most of the others head back inside to clean up, but Wanda, to Natasha’s surprise, lingers—and Vision does too, several yards away, as though he’s not actually waiting for Wanda, but there’s no other obvious reason for him to wander around in an improvised apple orchard.

Wanda fingers the leaves of one of the trees. “What kind is this one?”

“Winesap,” Natasha says. “Spicy, good for baking.” She has a sudden memory of lying on a deck chair on his terrace while Bruce repotted this one. She had been reading something untaxing, and the sun had been pleasant on her skin. She’d offered to teach him to make apple sharlotka. He had responded, _You think you’ll still be around then?_ And now, in the end, she’s the one who stayed.

Wanda goes from tree to tree, asking about names and uses; some of the types don’t have names, since they’re varieties that Bruce grafted himself.

“We had apple trees at my house,” Wanda says, finally. “Two of them: one Budimka and one Kolačara. My father was the one who mostly took care of them, although I helped sometimes. Pietro—” Her face twists into something that marries a smile and a sob. “Pietro would say that it was boring, but he liked eating them.”

Wanda’s grief is still fresh, and she wears it like a cloak. Natasha doesn’t know how to respond to anguish that deep and yet that unhidden. She takes Wanda’s hand, and hopes that’s an appropriate thing to do.

“Will these grow fruit soon?” Wanda asks, with only a little bit of hope.

Natasha doesn’t want to tell her the truth, but the trees themselves will expose a lie soon enough. “Probably not this year,” she says. “Everything I read said that apple trees usually don’t grow or bear fruit for about a year after they’re transplanted.”

Wanda reaches up again with her free hand and strokes the leaves of the Bardsley Island tree. “It’s hard, being taken away from home like that.” Particularly appropriate for this specimen, Natasha thinks: brought from an island across an ocean to another island, then immersed in foreign soil.

“But we can care for them better here,” Wanda continues, inflection rising at the end like an inquiry. “They should be in the ground, not in pots in a skyscraper.” She looks at Natasha, and she seems to have gathered herself together. Vision is walking over, as though it’s pure coincidence that he might have come upon Wanda and Natasha here. “It was good of you to look after the trees, and the plants too. Jim said they were Bruce’s, and that he left.”

“I didn’t do it for him,” Natasha says. “When these get some fruit, I’ll bake you some apple sharlotka. But if you want to come over tomorrow for tea, I think I’m going to make vatrushki.”

 

* * *

 

Six months later, Natasha is in her quarters icing her knee when there’s a knock on her door. She checks the camera, expecting to see Helen, or Steve and/or Sam, or maybe even Wanda, coming to check on the injury. Instead, she finds Bruce Banner.

She opens the door and aims her fist at his face, but changes course at the last second and hits his shoulder instead, no less forcefully. The punch throws him off balance, and he takes a step back to regain his equilibrium.

“I dare you to turn green,” Natasha says. “Also, fuck you. Also, how did you get in here?”

Bruce rubs at his shoulder and rotates it as though ensuring that it’s not dislocated. Then he puts his hands in his pockets and sighs, and he looks so much like the Bruce who sat on the balcony with her a year ago that her heart constricts in a painful clench. She puts her hand on the doorknob, ready to pull it closed.

“I’m not going to turn green,” Bruce says. “And I probably deserved that, both the curse and the punch. Steve let me in. I called him and told him I was coming.”

“He gets a phone call, I get an unannounced visit?”

“I didn’t think you’d pick up the phone.”

“I would have,” Natasha says, truthfully. They stare at each other for a moment, and she adds, “I need to get off my knee. Are you coming in or just lurking in my doorway?”

He comes inside, and Natasha sees him look around and take in the collection of succulents she kept. “Where are the lilies and orchids?” he asks. “And the trees?”

“I threw them out when I moved,” Natasha responds levelly, not breaking eye contact. She watches Bruce rock back even more sharply than when she hit him, almost losing his footing. His face goes white, and Natasha sighs. “The trees are outside. I gave the orchids and lilies to a school that the Maria Stark Foundation funds. Pepper had a greenhouse built just for them. There are cute pictures of the kids with their plants, if you want to see them.”

Bruce takes a breath and lets it out slowly. “Thank you.”

Natasha turns, careful not to twist her knee as she does, and goes toward the kitchen—she’s not exactly sure what she’s going to do there, but it’s better than the alternative of standing here, or of sitting while Bruce stands. She finds herself turning on the kettle to boil water for tea, and that seems like as good an option as anything. She’s long since lost the habit of brewing it according to the two-step Russian method; besides, in her own home, she’ll make her tea as strong as she damn well pleases, and Bruce can drink it or not.

Once the water has boiled and the Earl Grey—the one decent decaf that she gets on autoship from Zabar’s in the city—is in the pot, she sits down to let it steep. She’s got another hour before she should ice again, and in the meantime it’s best to keep the knee elevated. Bruce has to rummage through the cabinets to find the lemon and sugar that Natasha likes, and some milk for himself to use—dairy, because that’s what Natasha has on hand. There was a time that she kept soy milk for him, even though she feels it is a defilement of good tea, but that time is not now.

He pours for them and says, “What did you do to your knee?”

“HYDRA base. You should see the other guys. Well. If they were still alive to see.”

Bruce raises his mug in a toast. “Nice work.”

“Thanks.”

 

* * *

 

Natasha expects Bruce to go back to the city, to disappear into the labs of the Tower—Stark or Avengers, Natasha doesn’t keep track—but instead Steve assigns him quarters with the rest of them. Sometimes Bruce trains with them, though he’s cautious to the point of useless in hand-to-hand; sometimes he busies himself working with Helen and Erik. He takes shifts in the kitchens, filling in for cooks or dishwashers who are sick; he also spends time in the infirmary, changing dressings and monitoring patients. He makes himself useful, which, really, is typical of him.

 

* * *

 

The new facility, spacious and well-designed though it is, contains nothing in its two stories anything like the terraces back at Tony’s place. The wind was fierce up there even in the summer, but the noise of the city was distant and vague, and at night she could look out over the dark ribbons of Manhattan’s rivers and feel a sense of quiet available nowhere else.

Still, even with just two floors, you can sit on the roof on a particular kind of day and watch the storms roll in—sometimes across the mountains, sometimes down the broad, deep chasm that the Hudson has formed over the millennia. It’s a nice thing to do in late afternoons after long training days. Natasha has invited Wanda up a few times, and Steve too, and mostly they sit in companionable silence.

Today, though, Natasha is alone with her lounge chair and a steaming cup of Jiu Qu Hong Mei, which it turns out a tea shop in Beacon is able to decaffeinate without completely ruining. There are clouds coming in, dense and gray in a way that heralds a thunderous autumn downpour. She hears the door open, and turns, unstartled—Steve has come up on his own a couple of times, although Wanda always waits for an invitation. But instead it’s Bruce, carrying his own mug of something hot. He sees Natasha watching him, and stands still for a long moment before asking, “Mind some company?”

“No,” Natasha says, and gestures to the second lounge chair, folded up against one of the ventilation shafts, which she keeps here for this purpose. He fetches the chair and sits, and she asks, “What are you drinking?”

“Rooibos,” he says, and offers it to her to try. It’s earthy and tangy, and somehow tastes like the deep red that it is. “Do you miss the million-dollar view?” he asks.

“It was nice. But so are the trees and the stars.” She looks at him. “What about you? Going back?”

“Not everything is about views,” Bruce replies. “I think it’s Sharon Carter who likes to say that the view is just a function of where a person is standing.”

“That sounds like Sharon. Or like Maria, too. S.H.I.E.L.D. pragmatism. They program us with it.”

It’s a jab, but all Bruce does is snort. “No wonder Tony kept failing the test.”

Bruce is a pragmatist in his own way, Natasha thinks: searching for a way to live, failing sometimes but succeeding often, and relentlessly trying to learn from his own mistakes. “So it’s not about choosing the view,” she says, “so much as figuring out where to stand.”

“And that depends,” he says. “I don’t want to stand around in the way. I’d like to be of use.”

“I think it’s pretty clear that there’s plenty for you to do.”

Bruce doesn’t answer directly, and says instead, “The apples are looking good. I guess it’s not really a surprise that they’d flourish in natural soil.”

“No fruit this year because of the transplant,” Natasha says. “But it seems likely for next year.”

Bruce contemplates his tea, then, hesitantly, meets her eye. “Is the offer of apple sharlotka still open?”

“That’s a year from now, unless you want to go with store-bought apples. Are you sure you’ll still be here?”

“As sure as I can be of anything in this life.”

There’s a burst of thunder that Natasha feels in her heart and bones, and she picks up her cup. Bruce follows, and they fold their chairs and bring them inside, back to light and warmth.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, please [reblog on tumblr](http://azephirin.tumblr.com/post/126633576369/not-for-the-feast-but-for-themselves-the)!


End file.
